We went to
the car show in Oklahoma City. It was
pretty good. There were a lot of people who climb all over you when you try to
look in a door or open the hood. But no
salesmen. Lots of kids playing driver
who are cute. It was my chance to take
my bride as a captive audience and get her to try out the seats and entry for
comfort. Then she goes for the tailgate,
folds down seats because she is not dreaming cars but spring and all the
flowers she can haul in the back end.
They have the doggonedest names for
cars. Who decided, in their infinite
marketing wisdom to name a truck an Avalanche.
Isn’t that a big disastrous pile-up?
Or the Armada. Wasn’t that the
huge fleet which went down to the embarrassment of Spain? Reminds me of that car they used to call the
Citation. “Boy, you in trouble. I’m
gonna write you a citation.” Or when Volkswagen
named that little car the Golf. Gee,
does it run on batteries and have a fringed top? And who thought up that slogan for Chrysler, "imported from Detroit?" At least claim a respectible country without so much debt. That's worse than, "Imported from Greece."
I tend to just enjoy it. Do not fight the other people looking at the
cars but talk to them. One old guy was
trying to see the sticker behind a particularly dark tinted window. “Tough to see, ain’t it,” I observed. He grinned, “Yeah, if I had a car with
windows that dark they would think I was the mafia.” “I know,” I commiserated. “But if the police
saw us old guys driving ten miles an hour with our blinkers on, they’d know the
mafia was getting old.”
I
told the it’s-been-a-long-day girl who was waiting to speak on the rotating
stage she needed to get a drink so she wouldn’t look like Marco Rubio. When a bunch of us looked at a Lexus sports
car’s sticker at $381,000, I asked who wanted to flip me for it. Everybody started laughing about how you’d
have to win two lotteries!
I
had a nice visit with a very well-versed fellow who manned a booth on CNG where
several manufacturers had vehicles displayed but nobody talked to him. He taught me all about the ins and outs of
natural gas dual fuel conversions, and gave a map of all the Oklahoma outlets
for CNG. So with this freshly in mind, I
was approached a few minutes later by a hyperactive salesperson from Ford. I asked if Ford had a CNG truck. CNG makes more sense for a truck since it can
be placed affront the bed, protected against impact. No, Ford did not, he told me rather haughtily.
He was from San Francisco and he had
just heard of CNG for the first time this week and everyone was annoyingly asking
about it and he sure wouldn’t want such a vehicle if he were traveling cross
country where he would run out of fuel. Whatta you do then, walk?
I
couldn’t resist. Naw, the way it works is with a dual conversion, I told
him. You start the vehicle on gasoline
and the computer then changes over to the natural gas. So there is a 20 gallon gasoline tank as well
as the CNG tank and you can go for about 1000 miles using both tanks. Plus there are almost 100 natural gas outlets
already in OK and many in other states. About
¼ of an MCF of natural gas is equal to a gallon of gasoline so that is like
driving on 90 cent gasoline. Plus there
is an oil patch company in Oklahoma City that makes a home gas compressor you
can hook up outside your garage. CNG is
a coming thing for trucks, and our state is converting most of the state fleet
to CNG. We intend to show our jackass
President, who doesn’t want us to drill, that we are going to solve this thing
anyway. And then all his liberal friends
can just eat their hearts out and freeze in the dark.
You
should have seen the slack-jawed look of stunned befuddlement on his face.
ReplyDeleteFloyd loved it.